Marcia Gallant

Retired administrative assistant, Marbeck Center

2015 Faculty/Staff Service AwardThe award recognizes a former faculty or staff member who fostered a spirit of community
on campus through relationships with others, including students whom the recipient
mentored and inspired.

After her three children started school, Marcia Gallant went back to work and found
a second family.

Over 28 years, until her retirement in 2012, she was a mother figure to many Bluffton
students, offering a listening ear and counsel to members of her “Marbeck family”—the
hundreds of students she worked with as the administrative assistant in Marbeck Center.

Her history of caring, and friendship, made Gallant this year’s choice to receive
the Faculty/Staff Service Award. The award is presented to faculty and staff members
who have fostered a spirit of community through personal relationships with others,
particularly students they have mentored and inspired.

“There were some super ones who went through here,” Gallant says of the student assistants
who helped with such tasks as metering and sorting mail, answering the phone and,
before the electronic reservation system was introduced, making room reservations
campuswide.

“When they were here for the school year, I probably saw them more than their parents
did,” she points out. “We could discuss many things,” which could include deeply personal
matters.

“We laughed together, and we cried together. Some days, you just listened.”

The Bluffton resident says she tried not to be too “pushy” with her advice, which
was sometimes acknowledged with a hug of appreciation. Among those she tried to reach
were students who were thinking about leaving Bluffton for various reasons. She recalls
asking some to “give it another try,” to consider what they wanted to do after college
and possibly take different courses, and to “really think it through before you say
you’re not coming back.” The results? While some didn’t stay, others did, she says

She became friends with the majority of the student employees, Gallant says, and has
stayed in touch with many. A sports fan—and the 1996 recipient of the Larry W. Jones
Memorial Award for her support of Bluffton athletics—she still hears from former co-workers
who played women’s basketball and ask if she’s coming to alumni games they play on
campus each year.

And she continues to strengthen longstanding ties, too. Last year, for example, she
made “goodie bags” for Lauren Miller, then a first-year student from Dayton, and she
and her husband, Darryl, also took the volleyball player out for dinner. Lauren is
the daughter of Eric ‘89, who worked at the Marbeck information desk, and Teresa (Storrer
’92) Miller.

Gallant’s Marbeck memories include the “Mailroom Olympics” and annual decoration of
a Christmas tree, with student help, in the Kiva—plus the time that assistants held
pig races, complete with bales of straw and then-President Lee Snyder in attendance,
inside the building. The organizers cleaned up everything afterward, she adds.

Then there were the postcards that she liked to remind students, as well as staff,
to send back to Bluffton from their cross-cultural, spring-break and family travels.
Coming from farthest away, she estimates, was probably one sent from Australia by
Mark Bourassa, the Marbeck Center director. But others arrived from such locales as
Morocco—when her son, Allen, was in the Peace Corps there—and Jerusalem, where a sender
on a cross-cultural experience mailed one that didn’t show up until a year later.

The first postcards went on a bulletin board but, by the time she retired, they filled
two albums with reminders of students past. “If they were going somewhere, we wanted
to know and share in their adventures,” Gallant explains. “It was just a really good
tradition we started.”

Growing up in Mount Cory, Ohio, just up the road from Bluffton, Gallant was the younger
sister of Barbara Boutwell, a 1968 Bluffton graduate who was the first beaver mascot,
Bucky, and was inducted into the Athletics Hall of Fame in 1991. “That started our
association with Bluffton,” says Gallant, who kept the connection strong in her own
campus niche.

“I consider Marbeck a family, I really do,” she says, noting that its members also
included the four directors during her tenure. That list begins with Lawrence Matthews—who
hired her in 1984—and extends through Ron Slinger and Eric Fulcomer to Bourassa. The
director since 1996, he is also assistant dean of students and director of conferences
and the University Event Complex, which includes Founders Hall and the Sommer Center
as well as Marbeck.

“We tried to make it an atmosphere where students wanted to come to work,” Gallant
recalls. When student employees started at Marbeck, “we were total strangers but,
by working together almost every day, we got to know each other and built a good rapport.”